How to Erase Your Existence From the Internet
With the near-daily news of data breaches, hacks, and privacy concerns, the desire to disappear from the Internet is justified. Maybe you’re tired of the horribly awkward things that come up when potential employers search for your name on Google. Or are you tired of everyone knowing you live in a garden-level dungeon apartment? Or perhaps you just don’t like the fact that you are easy to find online.
For the moderately famous (or notorious) people, disappearing is nearly impossible, but for the average person it is surprisingly easy. It just depends on how much information is already there. Here’s how to do it.
Step 1. Delete your social media accounts
Chances are, the first results that come up when looking for your name on Google are your social media profiles. This most likely includes things like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other places where you use your real name. So, the first step to disappearing from the internet is to delete these profiles. If you just want to remove your search results, you can make your profiles private , skip this step and go to the second step. It’s not a perfect solution, but if you want to keep your social media accounts, it will at least pull results from search engines.
Here’s how to actually delete your major social media accounts:
Facebook: With Facebook you have the option to temporarily deactivate or permanently delete your profile. When you’re signed in, click the down arrow button in the upper right corner of any page, then choose Settings> Your Facebook Information> Deactivation and Removal. Select the option you want. Deactivation will hide your profile, but it is still there and you can return to it at any time. Deleting your account deletes all of your data and cannot be reactivated (after 30 days). Some messages may still appear, but from anything you have been tagged with, your name will be removed (although the images themselves will remain). If you want the photos to be completely deleted, the first step is to contact your friend directly and ask him to delete the photos.
Twitter: To delete your Twitter account, go to your account settings page and click “Deactivate my account” at the bottom. Your account will be completely deleted, but it may take several weeks before the results no longer appear in search results.
LinkedIn: To delete your LinkedIn account, go to the settings page , click the Account tab, scroll down to Closing LinkedIn Account and follow the instructions.
You will want to follow the above steps for any other social networks you use, have accounts on forums or other sites that you have registered under your real name (this may include Yelp , Amazon , Quora , etc.). If you find it difficult to remember all your accounts, Account Killer has a huge list with direct links to delete your profile from over 500 different sites.
A Google search for your name, as described in the first step, should also provide guidance on the places where you used your real name to create an account.
Step 2. Remove unnecessary search results
After you get rid of your social profiles, content is likely still moving around the web that you need to get rid of. These can be images, articles, or even employers’ websites. The first thing to do is find out where you appear on the Internet in search results. Do a Google search and bookmark (or bookmark) where your name appears on websites.
Basically, you have one way to remove this content: contact the source directly. Send an email to the website that hosts the content and politely ask them to remove it (or at least remove your name). A quick email works well for places like former employers who still haven’t removed you from their employee rosters, family members who post photos of you on their personal blogs, or even donation pages for reasons you supported. They will disappear from search results over time.
If you do not have a personal relationship with the site owner, look for contact information on the Contact Us or About Us page, or check Whois to find out who the site is registered to or which hosting company is hosting it.
After that, you can directly contact the search engines with a request to immediately delete the edited pages. You can do this through Google , but keep in mind that it doesn’t often remove images or content, unless someone posts defamatory content about you, infringing some copyright, or if the page displays sensitive information about you. Worth a try.
If you can’t get everything from Google search results, you might also want to consider hiding your personal details as much as possible . To do this, while maintaining your vow to permanently remove yourself from the Internet, create profiles on popular social sites such as Twitter or Facebook, as well as landing pages such as About.Me, using only your name and no other data. You can also create your own website filled with many keywords about your name but no actual information (or just create a 410 error page and leave it as it is ). It’s not as good as removing content entirely, but at least internet detectives will only land on a blank page without any information about you.
Step 3. Get rid of background checks, criminal records and public records
We’ve wiped out most of your search results and social media by now. But people can still do background checks and people look for you very easily. You will probably be a little surprised by the amount of information that these publicly available archives search databases have. It’s time to get rid of as many of them as possible.
We have a guide to choosing of the people look for sites as WhitePages , Spokeo , Intelius and Family Tree Now th fortunately most of them are pretty easy to leave. You have to provide varying amounts of information and a bunch of individual requests, but most of them at least allow you to do so.
If you do not want to go through this process, you can pay for this service as DeleteMe , the mechanism of failure of the subscription, which permanently removes your information from the websites of the data. DeleteMe also offers a range of free DIY tutorials.
Completing this step will help you get rid of everything that appears in the search results, but it won’t completely delete your data. As long as information such as your address and phone number is registered somewhere in public records (and, unfortunately, they are), people will be able to find you. But avoiding background checks, public records, and search engines only makes it harder to track personal information.
Step 4. Remove all usernames attached to the email address with your name.
Any good internet sleuth will be able to associate your usernames on forums, websites, and elsewhere with your email address. Subsequently, they will eventually associate this with your name.
The process for removing this data depends on the forums and sites you use. If you can, disconnect your primary email address from your username if possible. If you are dealing with forums, ask the moderators to remove all posts that personally identify you. Basically, get rid of any links between your email address or name with your username. If you use the same username for each site, consider coming up with new names for each site.
Step 5. Don’t go offline by search engines by staying anonymous.
From now on, you must remain vigilant and not disclose your information publicly. This means no social media with your real name and an annual background check of websites to make sure they have no new information about you.
But there is a chance that you still want to use the Internet, right? In this case, you will need to configure a few things to keep your data locked. This means creating a fake identity.
To do this, you can create an email address in a service like Gmail or Outlook with an alias. A fake name generator is a great way to come up with a new personality by specifying your date of birth, job, zodiac sign and more.
You can also use a temporary email address for all messages and then use your new alias and fake email address to subscribe to any services you need. To keep your cell phone recordings private, you might also consider using Google Voice instead of using a carrier, as you can create a name for your Google account.
For the rest of your internet activity, we’ve shown you many ways to keep your browsing anonymous. It will not affect the search for your name on the Internet, but it will at least distract advertisers from you.
When it comes to everything, the Internet has been around forever , and the truly resourceful people can always find you. But if you take the steps outlined above, you will at least thwart the internet detectives and restore some privacy.
This article was originally published in 2012 and was updated on 12/23/19.